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need big help w/RV740 issues

12-23-2009, 12:50 PM

I just bought an HD4770. I was using Debian Lenny but I upgraded to testing last night, thinking that I now have a use for newer packages. I installed xserver-xorg-video-radeon(6.12.3) after purging all the Nvidia packages, and set the driver in xorg.conf to radeon. I'm using Debian's 2.6.30-2-amd64 kernel, I have the libdrm2(2.4.15-1) package installed. I originally installed firmware-linux from testing, but the hardware support list in its description made no mention of RV740, so I installed firmware-linux-nonfree from sid. Unfortunately there's no mention of RV740 there either.

My problem is that there are "no adaptors present" for xv, and consequently I can't get MPlayer to display any video. I want to get TVout going too (though I think I might be able to get that going myself with the doc I found), but until I can display a video there's not much point.

And I added "DMAForXv" "on" too afterwards, before I realized from the manpage that that's the default

So this is my first day not having an all-inclusive nvidia blob to lean on. I have no idea what packages I need, or if the firmware package has a file for my card, where to get the file if it doesn't, etc, etc. And since everything is in flux, I have no idea what information to go on, when I can even find something relevant (which I haven't been doing too well at)

What am I missing? Is there a guide on getting the most out of the radeon driver as possible without compiling stuff from git?

I copied my xorg log and my xorg.conf with all its left over nvidia cruft, to pastebin. I'm happy to read documents and try to figure this out myself, but I just haven't the foggiest where to look or even what for.

I think your kernel/drm is too old. The coffee didn't work today so not sure of exact versions, but IIRC you need at least 2.6.32 for 2D acceleration on 6xx/7xx parts. You can see the drm open failing in xorg.log.

If you want to pastebin your dmesg output we can check to make sure nothing else is wrong.

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Thanks for the quick response bridgman. I thought though, that 2.6.30 was enough for at least xv - I came across this thread earlier, and the OP said that he just recompiled his 2.6.30(an rc, zen kernel though) kernel, selecting drm and radeon for inclusion. I'd have thought those things would already be included in the stock Debian kernel (maybe not Charlie's xen one though), and anyway, he seemed to have to just recompiled the same version and it was good enough.

Anyway, I'm willing to try just about anything, so I'm off to grab sid's 2.6.32 kernel. Here's hoping LIRC keeps working after...

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AFAIK you can do that now. The difference is that the work is being done in a branch off the kernel tree rather than a separate repo. You need to *download* the entire kernel tree but AFAIK you don't need to *build* it.

There are no explicit attempts to make newer drms work with older kernels, however within a narrow range that still seems to work.

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2.6.30 is needed for 2D/Xv, however, I think rv740 support was added in 2.6.31 as the hw wasn't available when 2.6.30 was released. 2.6.32 is required for 3D.

Aha! As I say, it's not easy to find reliable information at the moment. There's always one variable somewhere...

So! I Installed 2.6.32 from sid, and I now have one shiny new Radeon Textured Video Adaptor! Videos play! But there's another problem now, a lot of corruption in the display. For a moment I thought it might be KDE trying to use effects, the "enable effects" tickbox was still checked but the status display said "compositing is disabled". I unitcked the box anyway and restarted to no effect.

Anyway, this corruption is best described with a picture:
I've seen some corruption in GIMP's cursor too, but it's mostly in Plasma widgets, tooltips and mouse-over events, like in Dolphin moving the mouse over files, and mousing over the Kmenu button and the taskbar items, and the pager. Firefox seems to work just fine. If you change the resolution however, the corruption gets really crazy, all over everything.

Is this a case of 6.12.3 just being too old for my still-newish card? What can I do? I already had the non-free firmware package from sid installed. Testing and sid both have the same version of libdrm2. Am I missing something?